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This Seattle based startup company, Atlas Informatics, sees its mission as “if you’ve seen it, you can search for it.” Atlas Recall could become a highly important app (free, at the moment) for Mac users. This digital search software doesn’t just remember text summaries of or a link to a site you visited recently, but reproduces “what you viewed.”

Yes, when you search for a previously viewed site, Atlas Recall returns “visual thumbnails” of what you saw when you visited the site. How? This app indexes everything that you’ve looked at and snaps a picture of what you viewed previously. When you search for it, the app returns the image to you.

How Does It Sort Your Search Results?

Atlas Recall organizes the sites you visited today, last week, or last year with most recent first, divided by timeframe, and oldest last. This app will reproduce the content relevant to your search terms. Atlas Recall doesn’t just reproduce web pages, as it includes emails, chats, documents, or anything else you viewed in the reasonable past.

It then sorts and lists (displays) them in order of when you looked at them. Atlas Recall is designed to capture these items from Safari and Chrome browsers with a Mac, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and PDFs including web pages.

How Does It Work?

Atlas Recall captures data from your Mac, encrypts it, and stores it in the cloud. Hence, you’ll need to be connected to the ‘Net to use this app. However, storing data in the cloud allows you to make digital searches encompassing multiple computers.

This complement to major search engines, like Google, will even display results in a panel “next door” to the main Google search results page. The app is not intended to render Google or other major search engines obsolete.

Rather it’s designed to support these primary search engines, reminding users that they may want to visit other web pages or documents they’ve previously seen. Atlas Recall thoroughly has been tested in beta mode and has proven to work well.

Conclusion

Although Atlas Recall works, not surprisingly, it has some limitations. For now, it only works on Mac machines and iOS mobile devices. The iOS application only points to those items you’ve visited on your computer, not on your iPhone.

Further, you must install the app, which will not record your visits prior to downloading the Atlas Recall software. To enhance your security, you can erase items from your Mac photographic memory, such as signing in to your bank account.

Regardless of these limitations, Atlas Recall is a worthwhile addition to your recall arsenal, particularly while it’s still free.